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Paper cuttings made by 17th-century schoolgirls discovered beneath floorboards

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210 points benbreen | 7 comments | 23 Jul 24 04:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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disillusioned ◴[27 Jul 24 06:15 UTC] No.41084770[source]▶
My wife found a cool 1896 Harper's School Geography textbook at an antique shop and got it for me, and it had the original pupil's name and signature (and date of 1897!) written on the front matter, but there are also a few other handwritten notes and the name of the school itself... it's such a neat little self-contained time capsule.

It also boggles my mind:

1. How accurate it was, in terms of map fidelity

2. The quality of the illustrations and prints, many of which are in several (what I imagine was offset?) colors!

3. How well it's held up. The cover looks essentially completely trashed, but the interior of the book's pages are almost entirely intact, and in great shape. (I'm not worried of them turning to dust in my hands, for instance.)

It's always fascinating to see just how little has changed, especially among schoolkids in nigh on 300 years!

Here's essentially the exact book I'm talking about, so it's not _that_ uncommon. Looks to be in almost identical condition, too: https://www.ebay.com/itm/184283104558

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2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[27 Jul 24 12:36 UTC] No.41086184[source]▶
Is it due to a bias on our part that we think that it's fascinating? Why would people be different? People haven't changed, we just have phones now.
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blowski ◴[27 Jul 24 13:23 UTC] No.41086433[source]▶
> we just have phones now

That’s a huge understatement. We have electricity, refrigeration, medicine, mass transit (including international), human rights, enormous increases in population, fast media, internet, nuclear weapons, universal literacy, factory lines, spaceships, cities of many millions of people. Anyone that’s played Civilisation knows how far the tech tree goes once you hit the Enlightenment.

And you can see how much internet and social media have changed society, so imagine the impact of all those things combined on the human brain.

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1. 2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[27 Jul 24 13:33 UTC] No.41086489[source]▶
Right but people, their nature, hasn't changed.
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2. blowski ◴[27 Jul 24 13:59 UTC] No.41086647[source]▶
I find this a vague, reductionist view. When I have dinner with my family today, there’s more than one nature, while my own nature has changed in the last 10 years. To say most people have had the same nature at least for the last 300 years is only true if you reduce “nature” to something so banal that it means nothing at all.
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3. quonn ◴[27 Jul 24 16:13 UTC] No.41087466[source]▶
The distribution has not changed. Nobody said that an individual data point is fixed and that all data points are equal.
4. throwaway_2494 ◴[27 Jul 24 17:03 UTC] No.41087884[source]▶
I think what was intended was that _human_ nature hasn't changed.
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5. jvan ◴[27 Jul 24 17:45 UTC] No.41088170{3}[source]▶
I think anyone making that claim is going to have to define human nature in a way that has eluded several fields of study for generations.
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6. 2OEH8eoCRo0 ◴[27 Jul 24 23:23 UTC] No.41090081{4}[source]▶
The claim is that humans have changed. Tell me how humans are physically different today than 400 years ago.
7. mystified5016 ◴[28 Jul 24 03:06 UTC] No.41090965[source]▶
The behavior of one person over a single lifetime really has nothing at all to do with the behavior of humans as a species over the span of millennia.

Over the course of our history as a species, people have roughly always had the same drive. The same types of people have always existed and always follow the same patterns. Compare Alexander and Napoleon. Aristotle and Freud. Pliny and Darwin. Follow the lines of philosophy, science, engineering, politics, military all the way from antiquity to today. Each has a common thread woven back to the beginning of civilization.

You are not that different from someone living in ancient Rome, no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Times and culture change, but people have always been what we are now, good and bad both. We have the same drive for greed, generosity, community, solitude, family, power, glory. The wheel of Ka turns and turns.

You should study ancient history, it's pretty fascinating for exactly this reason. People are frequently quite surprised to learn just how similar ancient people were to how we see ourselves now. This is also one of the biggest mistakes people make when studying history: underestimating ancient peoples and framing them as some sort of primitive undeveloped animals. The pyramids were just as ancient and mysterious to the Romans as they are to us to this day.